Wallkill church site gets helping hands from afar

TOWN OF WALLKILL — Townley Hall is looking better, with help from "sojourners."

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By NATHAN BROWN

recordonline.com

By NATHAN BROWN

Posted Jul. 3, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By NATHAN BROWN
Posted Jul. 3, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

TOWN OF WALLKILL — Townley Hall is looking better, with help from "sojourners."

Eight RVs from as far away as New Mexico and west Texas converged on the Circleville building Thursday night. They'll be here for the next two weeks, refurbishing it for the Middletown Church of Christ, said Ed Stokum, the sojourners' team leader from Brownfield, Texas.

The church bought the building from the Town of Wallkill for $250,000 in December 2012. They've been meeting at the Howard Johnson Hotel on Route 211 East for 15 years or so, said church member Greg Johnson. He said they'd been looking for a home for five or six years.

"There (weren't) a lot of buildings like we were looking for in the Middletown area, and the ones that we did find were very, very expensive," he said. "We happened to come across that one, and things worked out wonderfully."

The sojourners are about 350 retired members of the Church of Christ who travel around the country helping out with church projects. They pay their own way in their travels. To "sojourn" is to stay somewhere temporarily; the word appears many times in the Bible.

"We like to think that our work glorifies God and encourages the local people," said Stokum, who is 70 and has worked on about 26 projects all over the country since he started in 2007.

The town bought the building on Goshen Turnpike about a decade ago; youth programs were held there earlier on, but it was little-used for the last few years the town owned it.

Johnson said they had hoped to move in by the end of the summer, although that may not be possible now because of some holdups with needed state permits. He said they've already received numerous inquiries from people who want to use the building for community activities again, too.

"Once we get everything fixed up, we see numerous things we can use the building for, for both the church and the community," he said.